The Cavalier

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"One too modest," I murmured, "to know her own portrait." I clutched the
braid emotionally and let it go intending to retake it; but she dropped
it behind her and said I was too imaginative to be safe.

I stiffened proudly, turned and mounted my steed, but her eyes drew
mine. I pressed close, bent over the saddle-bow, and said,
"Good-bye, Camille."

"Good-bye." I could barely hear it.

"Oh!--good-bye, just anybody?" I asked; and thereupon she gathered up
all her misplaced trust in me, all her maiden ignorance of what is in
man, and all her sweet daring, to murmur--

"Good-bye,--Dick."

I caught my breath in rapture and rode away. She was there yet when I
looked back--once--and again--and again. And when I looked a last time
still she had not moved. Oh, Camille, Camille! to this day I see you
standing there in pink-edged white, pure, silent, motionless, a
summer-evening cloud; while I, my body clad in its unstained--only
because unused--new uniform, and my soul tricked out in the
foolhardiness and vanity of a boy's innocence, rode forth into the night
and into the talons of overmastering temptation.

XIV

CORALIE ROTHVELT

The night was still and sultry. At one of the many camp-fires on the
edge of the road I saw the Arkansas colonel sitting cross-legged on the
ground, in trousers, socks and undershirt, playing poker.

Out in the open country how sweet was the silence. Not yet have I
forgotten one bright star of that night's sky. My mother and I had
studied the stars together. Lately Camille, her letter said, had learned
them with her. Now the heavens dropped meanings that were for me and for
this night alone. While the form of the maiden--passing fair--yet
glimmered in the firmament of my own mind, behind me in the south soared
the Virgin; but as some trees screened the low glare of our camp I saw,
just rising into view out of the southeast, the unmistakable eyes of the
Scorpion. But these fanciful oracles only flattered my moral
self-assurance, and I trust that will be remembered which I forgot, that
I had not yet known the damsel from one sun to the next.

I was moving briskly along, making my good steed acquainted with me,
testing his education, how promptly for instance, he would respond to
rein-touch and to leg-pressure, when I saw, in front, coming toward me,
three riders. Two of them were very genteel chaps, though a hand of each
was on the lock of his carbine. The third was a woman, veiled, and clad
in some dark stuff that in the starlight seemed quite black and
contrasted strongly with the paleness of her horse. Her hat, in
particular, fastened my attention; if that was not the same soft-brimmed
Leghorn I had seen yesterday morning, at least it was its twin sister. I
halted, revolver in hand, and said, as they drew rein,--"Good-evening."

"Good-evening," replied the nearer man. "How far is it to
camp--Austin's?"

"A short three miles."

"To what command do you belong?" he asked.

"Ferry's scouts. What command is yours, gentlemen?"

"Ferry's scouts." He scrutinized me. "What command do you say you--"

"Ferry's scouts," I repeated. "F-e-r-r-y-apostrophe s,
Ferry's--s-k-o-w-t-s--scouts."

The trio laughed, the young woman most musically.

"How long have you belonged to Ferry's scouts?" sceptically demanded
their spokesman.

"About an hour and a quarter."

"Oh! that-a-way."

"Yes," I replied, "in that direction."

The three laughed again and the men sank their carbines across their
laps, while in a voice as refined as her figure their companion said,
"Good-evening, Mr. Smith." She laid back her veil and even in the
darkness I felt the witchery of her glance. "I was just coming to meet
you," she continued, "to get the letter you're bringing me from General
Austin. I feared you might try to come around by Fayette, not knowing
the Yankees are there. These gentlemen didn't know it." "She just did
save us!" laughed the man hitherto silent.

"I'm Miss Coralie Rothvelt," she added, and then how she sparkled in the
dark as she said, "I see you remember me."

"I am but human."

"And yet you never take a lady's name for granted?"

"I am to know Miss Rothvelt by finding her in a certain place." My
honeyed bow implied that her being just now very much out of place was
no fault of mine.

"Nonsense!" muttered both men, and I liked them the better.

"My dear Smith," said Miss Rothvelt, "keep your trust. But if I part
here with these two kind gentlemen--"

"Who don't belong to Ferry's scouts at all," I still more sweetly added.

"No," she laughed, "and if I go back with you to Wiggins--to the little
white cottage, you know, opposite the blacksmith's shop,--you'll give me
what you've got for me, won't you?" She dropped her head to one side and
a mocking-bird chuckle rippled in her throat.

"I shall count myself honored," said I, and we went, together and alone.

XV

VENUS AND MARS

Since those days men have made "fire-proof" buildings. You know them;
let certain aggravations combine--they burn like straw. We had barely
started when I began to be threatened with a conflagration against which
I should have called it an insult to have been warned. The adroit beauty
at my side set in to explain more fully her presence. From her window
she had seen those two trim fellows hurrying along in a fair way to
blunder into the Federal pickets within an hour, had cautioned them, and
had finally asked leave to come with them, they under her guidance, she
under their protection.

"You were so anxious to get the General's letter?" I asked.

"I was so anxious about you," she replied, with feeling, and then broke
into a quizzical laugh.

I had not the faintest doubt she was lying. What was I to her? The times
were fearfully out of joint; women as well as men were taking war's
licenses, and with a boy's unmerciful directness I sprang to the
conclusion that here was an adventuress. Yet I had some better thoughts
too. While I felt a moral tipsiness going into all my veins, I asked
myself if it was not mainly due to my own inability to rise in full
manliness to a most exceptional situation. Her jaunty method of
confronting it, was I not failing to regard _that_ with due magnanimity?
Was this the truth, or after all ought I really to see that at every
turn of her speech, by coy bendings of the head, by the dark seductions
of dim half-captive locks about her oval temples, and by many an
indescribable swaying of the form and of the voice, I was being--to
speak it brutally--challenged? Even in the poetic obscurity of the night
I lost all steadiness of eye as I pertly said--

"And so here you are in this awful fix."

"I'm enjoying one advantage," she replied, "which you do not."

"What is that?"

"Why, I can read my safety in your face. You can't read anything in
mine; you're afraid to look."

All I got by looking then was a mellow laugh from behind her relowered
veil; but we were going at a swift trot, nearing a roadside fire of
fence-rails left by some belated foraging team, and as she came into the
glare of it I turned my eyes a second time. She was revealed in a garb
of brown enriched by the red beams of the fire, and was on the gray mare
I had seen that morning under Lieutenant Edgard Ferry-Durand.

"You recognize her?" the rider asked, delightedly. "She's not stolen,
she's only served her country a little better than usual to-day; haven't
you, Cousin Sallie?" (Cousin Sallie was short for Confederate States.)

The note of patriotism righted me and I looked a third time. The one art
of dress worth knowing in '63 was to slight its fashions without
offending them, and this pretty gift I had marked all day in the
Harpers. But never have I seen it half so successful as in the veiled
horsewoman illumined by the side-lights of those burning fence-rails.
The white apparition at the veranda's edge gleamed in my mind, yet
swiftly faded out, and a new fascination, more sudden than worthy heaved
at my heart. Then the fire was behind us and we were in the deep night.

On the crest of a ridge we slackened speed and my fellow-traveller
lifted her veil and asked exultantly what those two splendid stars were
that overhung yonder fringe of woods so low and so close to each other.
The less brilliant one, I said, the red one, was Mars.

"And the one following, almost at his side?"

"Don't you know?" I asked.

Her eyes flashed round upon me like stars themselves. "Not--Venus?" she
whispered, snatched in her breath, bit her lip, and half averting her
face, shot me through with both "twinklers" at once. Then she took a
long look at the planets and suddenly exclaimed with a scandalized air--

"They're going down into the woods together!"

"Yes," I responded, "and without even waiting for Diana."

She dropped the rein and lifted both arms toward them. "Oh, blessings on
your glorious old heathen hearts, what do you want of Diana, or of any
one in heaven or earth except each other!"

Foolish, idle cry, and meant for no more, by a heart on fire with
temptations of which I knew nothing. But then and there my poor
adolescent soul found out that the preceptive stuff of which it had
built its treasure-house and citadel was not fire-proof.

XVI

AN ACHING CONSCIENCE

Yet great is precept. Precept is a well. Up from its far depths by slow,
humble, constant process you may draw, in a slender silver thread, and
store for sudden use, the pure waters of character.

It has happened, however, that a man's own armor has been the death of
him. So the moral isolation of a young prig of good red blood who is
laudably trying to pump his conduct higher than his character--for
that's the way he gets his character higher--has its own peculiar
dangers. Take this example: that he does not dream any one will, or can,
in mere frivolity, coquette, dally, play mud-pies, with a passion the
sacredest in subjection, the shamefulest in mutiny, and the deepest and
most perilous to tamper with, in our nature. As hotly alive in the
nethermost cavern of his heart as in that of the vilest rogue there is a
kennel of hounds to which one word of sophistry is as the call to the
chase, and such a word I believed my companion had knowingly spoken. I
was gone as wanton-tipsy as any low-flung fool, and actually fancied
myself invited to be valiant by this transparent embodiment of passion
whose outburst of amorous rebellion had been uttered not because I was
there, but only in pure recklessness of my presence. Of course I ought
to have seen that this was a soul only over-rich in woman's love;
mettlesome, aspiring, but untrained to renunciation; consciously
superior in mind and soul to the throng about her, and caught in some
hideous gin of iron-bound--convention-bound--or even law-bound--foul
play. But I was so besotted as to suggest a base analogy between us and
those two sinking stars.

Unluckily she retorted with some playful parry that just lacked the
saving quality of true resentment. How I rejoined would be small profit
to tell. I had a fearful sense of falling; first like a wounded
squirrel, dropping in fierce amazement, catching, holding on for a
panting moment, then dropping, catching and dropping again, down from
the top of the great tree where I had so lately sat scolding all the
forest; and then, later, with an appalling passivity. And at every fresh
exchange of words, while she laughed and fended, and fended and laughed,
along with this passivity came a yet more appalling perversity; a
passivity and perversity as of delirium, and as horrid to her as to me,
though I little thought so then.

We came where a line of dense woods on our left marked the bottom-lands
of Morgan's Creek. With her two earlier companions my fellow-traveller
had crossed a ford here shortly after sunset, seeing no one; but a guard
might easily have been put here since, by the Federals in Fayette.
Pretty soon the road, bending toward it, led us down between two fenced
fields and we stealthily walked our horses. Close to a way-side tree I
murmured that if she would keep my horse I would steal nearer on foot
and reconnoitre, and I had partly risen from the saddle, when I was
thrilled by the pressure of her hand upon mine on the saddle-bow. "Don't
commit the soldier's deadliest sin, my dear Mr. Smith," she said under
her breath, and smiled at my agitation; "I mean, don't lose time."

I was about to put a false meaning even on that, when she added "We
don't need the ford this time of year; let us ride back as if we gave up
the trip--for there may be a vidette looking at us now in the edge of
those bushes--and as soon as we get where we can't be seen let us take a
circuit. We can cross the creek somewhere above and strike the Wiggins
road up in the woods. You can find your way by the blessed stars, can't
you--being the angel you are?"

My whole nature was upheaved. You may smile, but my plight was awful. In
the sultry night I grew cold. My bridle-hand, still lying under her
palm, turned and folded its big stupid fingers over hers. Then our hands
slid apart and we rode back. "I wish I were good enough to know the
stars," she said, gazing up. "Tell me some of them."

I told them. Two or three times my voice stuck in my throat, I found the
sky so filled, so possessed, by constellations of evil name. At our back
the Dragon writhed between the two Bears; over us hung the Eagle, and in
the south were the Wolf, the Crow, the Hydra, the Serpent--"Oh, don't
tell any more," she exclaimed. "Or rather--what are those three bright
stars yonder? Why do you skip them?"

"Those? That one is the Virgin's sheaf; and those two are the Balances."

I failed to catch her reply. She spoke in a tone of pain and sunk her
face in her hand. "Head ache?" I asked. "No." She straightened, and
from under her coquettish hat bent upon me such a look as I had never
seen. In her eyes, in her tightened lips, and in the lift of her head,
was a whole history of hope, pride, pain, resolve, strife, bafflement
and defiance. She could not have chosen to betray so much; she must have
counted too fully on the shade of her hat-brim. The beautiful frown
relaxed into a smile. "No," she repeated, "only an aching conscience.
Ever have one?"

I averted my face and answered with a nod.

"I don't believe you! I don't believe you ever had cause for one!" She
laid a hand again upon mine.

I covered it fiercely and sunk my brow upon it. And thereupon the wave
of folly drew back, and on the bared sands of recollection I saw, like
drowned things, my mother's face, and Gholson's and the General's, and
Major Harper's, and Ned Ferry's, and Camille's. Each in turn brought its
separate and peculiar pang; and among those that came a second time and
with a crueler pang than before was Camille's.

"You're tired!" murmured the voice beside me, and the wave rolled in
again. I lifted my brow and moved one hand from hers to make room on it
for my lips, but her fingers slipped away and alighted compassionately
on my neck. "You must be one ache from head to foot!" she whispered.

I turned upon her choking with anger, but her melting beauty rendered me
helpless. Black woods were on our left. "Shall we turn in here?"
I asked.

"Yes." She stooped low under the interlacing boughs and plunged with me
into the double darkness.

XVII

TWO UNDER ONE HAT-BRIM

"Is this the conservatory?" playfully whispered Miss Rothvelt; and if a
hot, damp air, motionless, and heavy with the sleeping breath of
countless growths could make it so, a conservatory it was. Every
slightest turn had to be alertly chosen, and the tangle of branches and
vines made going by the stars nearly impossible. The undergrowth crowded
us into single file. We scarcely exchanged another word until our horses
came abreast in the creek and stopped to drink. Conditions beyond were
much the same until near the end of our detour, when my horse swerved
abruptly and the buzz of a rattlesnake sounded almost under foot. The
mare swerved, too, and hurried forward to my horse's side.

"That was almost an adventure, itself," laughingly murmured my
companion, as if adventures were what we were in search of. While she
spoke we came out into a slender road and turned due north. "Did you,"
she went on, childishly, "ever take a snake up by the tail, in your
thumb and finger, and watch him try to double on himself and bite you? I
have, it's great fun; makes you feel so creepy, and yet you know
you're safe!"

She laughed under her breath as if at hide-and-seek. Then we galloped,
then trotted again, galloped, walked and trotted again. Two miles,
three, four, we reckoned off, and slowed to a walk to come out
cautiously upon the Union Church and Fayette road. A sound brought us
to a halt. From the right, out on the main road, it came; it was made by
the wheels of a loaded wagon. I leaned sidewise until her hat-brim was
over me and whispered "Yankee foragers;" but as I drew my revolver we
heard voices, I breathed a sigh of relief, and with her locks touching
mine we chuckled to each other in the dark. The passers were slaves
escaping to the Federal camp.

Now they came into view, on the broader road, two whole ragged families
with a four-mule team. They passed on. And then all at once the whole
situation was too much for me. In the joy of release I groped out
caressingly and touched my companion's cheek. Whereat she took my
fingers and drew them to her lips--twice. The next moment I found--we
found--my lifted wrists in the slender grasp of her two hands and she
was murmuring incoherent protests. Suddenly she grew eloquent. "Oh,
think what you are and have always been! Do you think I don't know? Do
you suppose I would have put myself into this situation, or taken the
liberties I have taken with you, if I had not known you, and known you
well, before ever I saw you? Ah! I have heard such good things of you!
and the moment I saw you I saw they were true!--Yes,--yes, I tell you
they were, they are! And I'm not going to take my trust away from you
now! You shall keep my trust as you have kept all others. You shall be
as miserly of it as of your general's. You will keep it!" Her whispers
grew more and more gentle. "My dear friend, my dear friend! what is this
trust compared to the trust I wish I might lay on you?" What did she
mean by that! Had she some schemer's use for me? I could not ask, for
her little hands had gradually slipped from my wrists to my fingers and
were softly, torturingly fondling them. Suddenly she laughed and threw
her hands behind her back. "I'm blundering! Oh, Richard Smith, be kind
to a woman's poor wits, and let me say to-morrow that I know one man who
can be trusted--who I know can be trusted--to make a woman's folly her
protection. Do you know, dear, that any woman who can say that, is
richer than any who cannot? And I am but a woman, sometimes a bit silly.
Trouble is I'm a live one and a whole one!--or else I'm a live one and
not quite a whole one--I wonder which it is!"

I mumbled something about never wishing to tempt any one.

"Oh, you haven't tempted me," she replied, with kind amusement. "You
couldn't if you should try. You're a true soldier, with a true soldier's
ideals; and I'm pledged to help you keep them."

"What do you mean?" I demanded. "To whom are you pledged for any such--"

"Oh!--don't you wish you knew! Why, to myself, for instance. Come! duty
calls."

"Come!" I echoed. We swung into the broader road and followed the
contrabands.

We came as close to them as was wise, and had to walk our horses. I
could discern Miss Rothvelt's features once more, and felt a truer
deference than I had yet given her. Near the blacksmith's shop, in the
dusk of some shade-trees, she once more touched my shoulder. I turned
resentfully to bid her not do it, but her shadowy gaze stopped me.

"Don't be moody," she said; "the whole mistake is four-fifths mine. And
anyhow, repining is only a counterfeit repentance, you know. Come, I
don't want to tease you. It's only myself I love to torment. I'm the
snake I like to hold up by the tail. Did you never have some dull,
incessant ache that seemed to pain less when you pressed hard on it?"
She laughed, left me and rode into the cottage gate.

What do you say?--Yes, she might have spoken more wisely. Yet always
there vibrated in her voice a wealth of thought, now bitter, now sweet,
and often both at once, and a splendor of emotions, beyond the scope of
all ordinary natures. How far beyond my own scope they were, even with
my passions at flood-tide and turbid as a back-street overflow, I
failed to ponder while I passed around the paling fence alone.

In the edge of the woods at the rear of this enclosure I found the road
that led into Cole's Creek bottom, and there turned and waited. A corner
of the cottage was still in view among its cedars and china-trees. In an
intervening melon-patch blinked the yellow lamps of countless fireflies.
And now there came the ghost of a sound from beyond the patch, then a
glimpse of drapery, and I beheld again the subject of my thoughts. Such
thoughts! Ah! why had I neither modesty, wit nor charity enough to see
that yonder came a woman whose heart beat only more strongly than the
hearts of all the common run of us, with impulses both kind and high,
although society, by the pure defects of its awkward machinery, had
incurably mutilated her fate; a woman wrestling with a deep-founded love
that, held by her at arm's length, yielded only humiliations and by its
torments kept her half ripe for any sudden treason even against that
love itself.

She came without her horse, pointing eagerly at the brightness of the
sky above the unrisen moon. "Diana!" she whispered, and tossed a kiss
toward it. "You saw me put the mare into the stable and go into the
house by the back door?"

"Yes," I said, and handed her, as I dismounted, the General's gift, the
pass.

She snatched it gaily, loosed a fastening at her throat and dropped the
missive into her bosom. Then with passionate gravity she asked, "Now,
are you going straight on to Clifton to-night--without stopping?"

"I haven't been ordered to tell any one where I'm going."

"Neither was Lieutenant Ferry," she dryly responded, "yet I have it from
him."

"He told you?--Ah! you're only guessing," I said, and saw that I was
helping her to guess more correctly.

"Pooh!" she replied, ever so prettily, "do you suppose I don't know?
Ferry's scouts are at Clifton, and you've got a despatch for
Lieutenant--eh,--Durand--hem!" She posed playfully. "Now, tell me;
you're not to report to him till daylight, are you? Then why need you
hurry on now? This house where I am is the only safe place for you to
sleep in between here and Clifton. I'll wake you, myself, in good time."
My heart pounded and rose in my throat, yet I managed to say, "My
orders are plain." I flinched visibly, for again I had told too much. I
pretended to listen toward the depths of the wood.

She struck a mock-sentimental attitude and murmured musically--

"'The beating of our own hearts
Was all the sound we heard.'

"Yes,"--she put away gaiety--"your orders are plain; and they're as
cruel as they are plain!"

"Cruel to you?" I took her hand from my arm and held it.

"Oh! cruel to you, Richard, dear; to you! And--yes!--yes!--I'll
confess. I'll confess--if only you'll do as I beg! Yes, ah yes, cruel to
me! But don't ask how, and we'll see if you are man enough to keep a
real woman's real secret! And first, promise me not to put up at that
house which the General and Lieutenant Ferry--"

"Lieutenant Ferry is not sending me to any house."

"Pardon me, I know better. This is his scheme." She laid her free hand
on our two. "Tell me you will not go to that house!"

I attempted an evasion. "Oh--a blanket on the ground--face covered up in
it from the mosquitos--is really--"

"Right!" She laughed. "I wish a woman could choose that way. Oh! if
you'll do that I'll go with you and stand guard over you!"

Dolt that I was, I would have drawn her close, but she put me off with
an outstretched arm and forbidden smile. "No!--No! this is a matter of
life and death."

I stepped back, heaving. "Who and what are you? Who and what are you?"

"Why, who and what should I be?"

"Charlotte Oliver!"

"Hmm; Charlotte Oliver. Are you sure you have the name just right?"

"Why haven't I got it right?"

"Oh, I don't doubt you have; though I didn't know but it might be
Charlie Toliver or something."

I dilated. "Who told--did Ned Ferry tell you that story?"

"He did. Or, to be accurate, Lieutenant Ferry-Durand. My dear Richard,
we cannot be witty and remain un-talked-about."

"I--I believe it yet! You are Charlotte Oliver!"

She became frigid. "Do you know who and what Charlotte Oliver is?--No?
Well, to begin with, she's a married woman--but pshaw! you believe
nothing till it's proved. If I tell you who and what I am will you do
what I've asked you; will you promise not to stop at Lucius Oliver's
house?" She softly reached for my hand and pressed and stroked it.
"Don't stop there, dear. Oh, say you will not!"

"Is it so dangerous?"

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